2024.08 Vol.2

I want to increase the use of encryption in the bitcoin ecosystem to move the ball forward a few yards on the censorship-resistant front. BIP324 is the starting point and implementing the spec in rust with the BIP324 library was the first step. There are three areas I want to keep pushing on for the library.

1. Push the cryptography primitives of the library “down” into rust-bitcoin. // The library has zero-dependencies and is no-std friendly, requirements for rust-bitcoin. But ideally, the cryptographic primitives like the ChaCha20 cipher and Poly1305 MAC would live somewhere closer to the core of rust-bitcoin. This would get more eyes on the code, always a good thing, but it would also let other parts of the ecosystem easily use them.
2. Improve the use-ability and robustness of the library. // The library is fully functioning, but the API can be improved with client feedback and there are a few subtle parts of the spec which could be implemented better.
3. Push the library “up” into any clients that don’t have the bandwidth to adopt it themselves. // Ideally the library is so easy to use it is just instantly adopted, but might not be realistic in all cases.

I’ll also be keeping logs of my journey over the year. This is mostly for me, writing things down in my own words is how I “lock in” something hard to wrap my head around. But I am making the notes public on the off chance they help just one other developer go from 0-to-some knowledge of the cryptography in bitcoin. We ain’t all going to be Satoshi level hackers, but I think it is valuable to spread the knowledge to maintain these base level primitives.